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of the practical sense, for during the last fifty years,
Polish society made enormous strides in the economic
and financial sphere. I had frequently noticed and
known this essentially political mentality among the
Balkan nations, but there, owing to the absence of other
intellectual interests, one ended by becoming tired of
eternal politics. Here the national tendency was allied
to a refined education and to a mind open to the most
subtle speculative conceptions, the whole supported by
the old ground-work of learning and classical literature
which up to now has been one of the most powerful
elements of solidarisation and of mutual comprehension
between people of different nations and different faiths.
I shall always remember my very pleasant relations
with some eminently sympathetic and clever persons,
such as M. Dobiecki, Count Sobanski, the two brothers
Wielopolski, M. Skirmunt and many others, including
also some women of very great charm and lively
intelligence. Could it really be possible that through a
violent craze for equality the flower of Polish aristocracy
should entirely disappear and have no more influence
on the future development of the beautiful resuscitated
country? I will not believe it, and I quote Benjamin
Constant’s saying, “l’esprit surnage.”
Some Lithuanian politicians also came to Stockholm,
and they called on me.
I have always felt interested in this nationality,
whose history is so closely and so strangely interwoven
with the history of its two neighbours, Russia and
Poland. A curious language, akin to Sanskrit, a still
more curious historic destiny!
Up to the beginning of the fourteenth century the
nation lives in a savage and curiously druidical state in
the huge virgin forests which afford shelter to the
Lithuanian and with him to the “aurochs.” Then
suddenly warlike enterprises begin: the antique race is
collected together under the rule of one king; the
neighbouring Russian principalities—which formerly made
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